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Part of
Complimenting Behavior and (Self-)Praise across Social Media: New contexts and new insights
Edited by María Elena Placencia and Zohreh R. Eslami
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 313] 2020
► pp. 213–236

Chapter 9
Healthy lifestyle, dieting, fitness and bodybuilding

Compliments in the context of Polish online discussion forums and message boards

| University of Gdansk

This paper studies compliments that occur in selected Polish online discussion forums devoted to topics related to a healthy lifestyle, dieting, fitness and bodybuilding. The aim of the investigation is to find out which syntactic structures, topics and functions are prevalent, and whether the Corpus Query Language is an adequate tool to analyze compliments in data retrieved from Internet forums. The study has shown that (1) the most frequent structures differ from those identified in previous studies, (2) the predominant topics identified in this study only partially overlap with previous studies, and (3) the most common function is expressing solidarity and establishing rapport. The corpus-based methodology and CQL, with some limitations, proved useful and allowed effective examination of a large database of ca. six million words.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, corpus-based analysis, new media, online forums, message boards, compliments, computer-mediated communication, healthy lifestyle, fitness, Polish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Social media and online forums
  • 3.Studying complimenting behavior
  • 4.Corpus and data collection methodology
  • 5.Data analysis
    • 5.1Direct compliments
      • Structure 1 (“NP {is/looks} (really) ADJ”)
      • Structure 2 (“I (really) {like/love} NP”)
      • Structure 3 (“PRO is (really) (a) ADJ NP”)
      • Structure 4 (You V (really) ADJ NP)
      • Structure 5 (“You V (NP) (really) ADJ”)
      • Structure 6 (“You have (a) (really) ADJ NP”)
      • Structure 7 (“What (a) ADJ NP!”) and structure 9 (“Isn’t NP ADJ?”)
      • Structure 8 (“ADJ NP!”)
    • 5.2Indirect compliments
      • Structure 1 (“You look like NP”)
      • Structure 2 (“You are like NP”)
    • 5.3Implicit compliments
    • 5.4Other compliments
    • 5.5Intensifying adjectives and adverbs
    • 5.6Internal and external modification
    • 5.7Topics
    • 5.8Functions
    • 5.9Summary
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 December 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.313.09bac
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Bączkowska, Anna
2022. Forms of Address in Polish Nonprofessional Subtitles. In Language Use, Education, and Professional Contexts [Second Language Learning and Teaching, ], ► pp. 71 ff. DOI logo
Khrystenko, Oksana
2022. Dekodierung der Implizitheit des wertenden Urteils in Komplimenten (am Beispiel der cross-kulturellen Analyse von Gesprächen in männlichen geschlechtshomogenen Gruppen). Glottotheory 13:2 ► pp. 143 ff. DOI logo

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